Erotics On The Silver Screen

Last night we watched Murnau's Sunrise in which a manly country bumpkin (George O'Brien), much in love without realizing it with his demure wife (Janet Gaynor), is seduced by a female city slicker up in the country on vacation.  She improbably enough persuades him to murder the wife by drowning her and go off for a life of fun and lust in the city.  Once out in the boat hubby does not go through with this, although rousing such suspicion in his wife, that when they get across the lake, she tries to flee.  The upshot is that they both somehow get on a trolley improbably running out in the woods and go into town.  There ensues both comic and heartwarming episodes of them cutting it up in the big town. Eventually they go back, wife nearly drowns in an enormous storm,   Improbable is the word for a great deal in this film, except when the rescuers bring the lady back to her husband who is sunk into the depths of grief, their reunion, their palpable deep gentle love for each other is so radiantly displayed on both their faces, especially his, that the scene sinks indelibly into one's consciousness.  I can't get it out of my mind, and it makes me think of other cinematic moments of erotic emotion that have remained with me.  For instance, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.  She is a nightclub entertainer, he is serving in the French Foreign Legion.  At the nightclub he sits in the audience before the stage when she enters from the side, and approaches a table, at which sit two couples.  She takes a flower from them, leans over and kisses one of the women on the lips firmly and longer than she should, then saunters to center stage, where after a bit she throws the flower to Cooper.  He is young in this film, and beautiful, and compellingly androgynous, shy, and available.  He takes the flower and puts it behind his ear, completing the image of the coquette improbably enough in Foreign Legion drag.  It is a stunning scene of gender role reversal, equaled by the extraordinarily lunatic ending when the Dietrich character decides to follow her man into the desert, and there is Marlene in a shining, sinuous evening gown, with gold high heels, setting off into the sand. But you can fantasize the grit of the sand as the Legionnaire's rough hairy body just as you can her shining sandals and silken dress as the soft, perfumed nakedness she will offer him. Flash forward in time to find Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman waiting in the front hall of the home of a would-be client, whose wife played by Barbara Stanwyck, has been informed by the maid that he is there to see her.  As he waits, and in a voice over talks of his immediate seduction by the wife, we see him dipping his hand into a fish aquarium, and feeding the fish, a dazzling,  wonderful violation of space,  and entirely wet.  At which point Phyllis Diedrichson enters at the head of the stairs, coming down step by step in fabulous and oh so fake or maybe just dyed blonde hair (who ever thought of Barbara Stanwyck as this kind of blonde?), a gold ankle bracelet jangling in the rhythm of her descent, glittering as the camera lovingly moves over her ankles and legs. The trouble has begun; the film is Double Indemnity.  Flash forward much later to the first great gay tearjerker as we watch Jake Gyllenhall wait outside the house of the man he has been making out with up in the mountains and greet Heath Ledger in one of the most ferocious, hungry, desperate, strong man to strong man embraces possible,  almost seems a fistfight or some manly act of aggression until the passion strikes you..  Such desperate and sweet and hopeless love.  Who can stop the tears?